The utility of cleaning articles as used in the home, in businesses and elsewhere is well known. Such cleaning articles, such as sponges and wipes, are used in a wide variety of different, and often conflicting, cleaning applications. For example, such cleaning articles are commonly used for relatively sanitary cleaning applications, such as cleaning dishes, glassware, cooking pots and pans, kitchen countertops, kitchen cabinets, kitchen sinks, dining tables and other surfaces and items that come into contact with food or are used during the food preparation process.
Yet virtually identical cleaning articles are also commonly used for other and often dramatically less sanitary and hygienic cleaning applications, such as bathroom toilets, bathroom tubs, bathroom sinks, floors, walls, cars, boats and windows. Interchanging these applications obviously is undesirable, and possibly dangerous, owing to the buildup and retention of bacteria in such cleaning articles, particularly in the first application. Thus, users do not wish nor should they use the same cleaning articles to wash sanitary and non-sanitary applications.
Moreover, consumers also occasionally desire a ready and apparent means of identifying cleaning articles for use with specific tasks, such as waxing furniture, that ought not be used for other purposes, such as naptha used to clean wood surfaces. Also, certain cleansers contain chemicals that do not interact well with chemicals contained in other cleansers, for example, ammonia and chlorine bleach. Quickly identifying the purpose for which the cleaning article has been used in the past or is to be used as intended can help avoid such undesirable interactions.
Accordingly, to provide a solution to these problems, it is desirable that there be cleaning articles that can be readily identified as appropriate for a particular application and that are provided with a visual indicia indicating such particular application. Although in the past color, size and materials of the cleaning articles themselves were the key features used to identify cleaning articles, it is not uncommon that otherwise identical cleaning might be encountered, each having a very different intended application or the intended application for that specific cleaning article may have been forgotten.
In sum, an identification system for positively identifying individual cleaning articles for their specific intended cleaning application was needed.